The Killers ‘ Sunday headlining performance at this weekend’s debut edition of the KAABOO Del Mar festival has been a matter of record for months. But the Las Vegas-bred band’s 11 p.m. Saturday show at the 1,200-capacity Observatory North Park came out of the blue, with tickets having quietly gone on sale Tuesday and quickly selling out, without any official announcement.

“That is correct,” Killers’ guitarist Dave Keuning, a North County resident, told the Union-Tribune Tuesday afternoon. “It’s both a warm-up gig (for KAABOO), even though we played two other shows (recently), and it’s just a fun gig for us to play at a small place. We probably wouldn’t play a place like North Park if we did a future arena tour. I haven’t even been there (to the Observatory). I see bands at the Belly Up or downtown occasionally.”

The Killers’ Twitter page has a post that refers to the band performing Saturday night in San Diego. But the post lists the Casbah, the barely 200-capacity club where the group played early on in its career, not the Observatory. Casbah honcho Tim Mays, who also books shows the Observatory, said he does not know why the Casbah was listed in the tweet.

To prevent ticket scalping, tickets for The Killers’ 18-and-up Saturday show must be picked up at the venue the night of the show and are non-transferable. A photo ID will be required.

Veteran San Diego Union-Tribune pop music critic George Varga began drumming in rock bands at 12 and writing professionally about music at 15. A Louisiana native who grew up mostly in Germany, Varga has earned three Pulitzer Prize nominations for his writing at the U-T and is a voting member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In addition to providing live coverage of the Grammy Awards and festivals from Coachella and KAABOO to the 1994 edition of Woodstock, he has interviewed everyone from Ray Charles, Miles Davis and Britney Spears to Willie Nelson, Kanye West and Bruno Mars. A double first-prize winner at the 2018 Society of Professional Journalists awards, Varga is also a contributing writer for Jazz Times magazine and has written for Billboard, Spin and other publications. After attending San Diego City College and San Diego State University, he created and taught the 2002 UC San Diego Extension course, “Jazz in a Post-Ken-Burns World.” Varga lives with his wife in North Park.